Reconsidering the Short Story

I have never been much of a short story reader; it’s a form that I – and I think most people – associate with middle and high school English classes, a form that is ideal for quickly teaching plot, characterization and irony, but not something readers outside of school, well, read. Who doesn’t remember O. Henry’s “The Ransom of Red Chief”, “The Gift of the Magi” and   Ray Bradbury’s “The Sound of Thunder”?

In recent years, however, I have changed my mind.  Ironically, or not, my rediscovery of the short story did happen in a classroom.  A few years ago my colleague and I, teaching senior IB English, decided to reconsider the novels we were asking students to read in the spring, novels that, if we were lucky, 50% might finish, the rest having succumbed to senioritis.  We decided to end the semester with short stories, pairing pieces from South African writer Nadine Gordimer’s  Jump and Other Stories with selections from Nigerian Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s The Thing Around Your Neck.  The buy-in for reading skyrocketed as students could all power through 5 to 10 page stories that could be read in one sitting and, even more exciting, the resulting discussions were rich and wide-ranging.  An added bonus:  as an adult reader, aside from my role as teacher, I found most of the stories complex and interesting and looked forward to reading and discussing them.  Adichie’s stories are set both in Nigeria and in the United States and many focus on characters who are seeking to clarify their own identity while struggling to overcome stereotypes and judgments of others.  Her manipulation of narrative, her imagery and her deft handling of communication between characters makes her stories masterful.  “Jumping Monkey Hill,”  one of my favorites in the collection, is about a small group of African writers who gather for a writer’s retreat sponsored by a British society and organized by a Brit, Edward.  Stereotypes abound as Edward treats the writers as “Africans” and proceeds to tell them that what they write about doesn’t sound African enough. 

Gordimer, a white South African, confronts race relations in a variety of ways and her use of symbolism is powerful. A student favorite in the Gordimer collection, “Some Are Born to Sweet Delight,” is about a family that lets a room to a foreigner whose home country is never named, but context clues suggest that he is from the Middle East.  The daughter in the family falls for him and is so in love with love that she (and often the reader) ignore some very important details. . .  “The Ultimate Safari” is the heart-breaking story of refugees who must travel across a game park filled with wild animals like lions to reach a safe camp.  They pass by white vacationers who are staying in luxury, there for a safari.

Yet another classroom activity that drew me into short stories, albeit a different kind, was a fiction-writing unit I taught at the end of last year.  In search of short examples for short original pieces, I discovered Flash Fiction:  72 Very Short Stories, edited by Thomas, Thomas and Hazuka.  The concept, as explained in the book’s introduction, is to write a complete short story that will fit on two facing pages so that the reading is not interrupted by the turning of the page.  Most of the stories in the collection are around 750 words.  The stories are typically first or third person and limited to one or two characters.  Out of necessity, they jump right into the moment without an exposition and most have a surprise ending.  While I intended to read only enough to find three or four good examples for students, I found myself reading the whole book.  Most of the stories are quite good and it was too easy to think, “Oh, I will just read one more.”  One of my favorite stories was “Deportation at Breakfast” by Larry Fondation.  A guy goes into a diner and orders breakfast.  While he is waiting, the Hispanic man who is cooking and running the place is arrested by the immigration police.  The narrator is hungry and senses his eggs are going to burn, so he gets up and finishes cooking his breakfast.  While he is behind the counter, other customers come in, assume that he works there, and order breakfast.  The story ends with him contemplating hiring extra help.  In addition to being fun to read, I found the stories also inspired me to write flash fiction.

Here are a few other short story collections that I have read in recent years and definitely recommend:

Redeployment by Phil Klay

Winner of the National Book Award, this collection of related stories is reminiscent of Tim O’Brien’s All the Things They Carried in its focus on individual soldiers and the aftermath of war.  The opening line of one story is, “Success was a matter of perspective.  In Iraq it had to be.”  This reflects what Klay does so well in this book – showing a variety of perspectives, none of which reflects that the American involvement in Iraq was positive.  Each story assumes the voice of a different person involved the war.  Often the narrators are soldiers, but one of the best stories channels a civilian contractor who naively believes that he can make big changes. Klay’s un-PC point of view is very effective.  A veteran in a bar tells a guy he meets there about a particularly harrowing war experience.  The guy declares his respect for soldiers and the veteran replies, “I don’t want you to respect what I’ve been through.  I want you to be disgusted.”  This seems to be at least one overall goal of the book:  to deglamorize war, to pull back the curtain and show the physical, emotional and spiritual destruction that it reaps. 

Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri

From the writer of The Namesake and The Lowlands, this collection echoes similar themes of identity and exile.  The stories capture the challenges of first generation Americans and their immigrant Bengali parents.

Ford County by John Grisham – a departure from his usual legal procedural, this collection seems like Grisham’s slam dunk of his home state of Mississippi.  Many of the characters represent the stereotypical deep Southerner of country western songs:  alcoholic, cheating, loose, gambling, racist. Several of the stories are humorous and the book shows that this writer is capable of work more literary than courtroom thrillers.

Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk by David Sedaris – I am a huge fan of Sedaris’ memoir-type stories and embarrass family members by laughing so hard when I talk about them, I can hardly get the words out.  He’s not to everyone’s taste, however.   That said, these are stories written like modern fables featuring animals who clearly represent people or types of people.  My favorite story was about two flies who meet in a pool of vomit at the bus station and the one fly goes on and on about her connections.  She has eaten the vomit and once the feces of the lieutenant governor’s wife and sees herself as superior to the other fly as a result.

Honeydew by Edith Pearlman

An eclectic collection of stories, many of which bear discussion in a book group.  Pearlman creates interesting characters and writes with an eye for detail.  Several of my favorite stories (“Puck” and “Assisted Living”) take place in a thrift shop called Forget Me Not.  Pearlman explores the significance of objects to memory and the importance of not letting love slip away.  “The Golden Swan” takes place on a cruise ship, providing a contrast between the experiences of the pampered passengers above deck and the employees below.  “Wait and See” is an imaginative story about a man who has pentachromatic eyesight, meaning that he can see many more shades of color than the average person.

And finally, sitting on my nightstand. . .

The State We’re In:  Maine Stories by Ann Beattie  (in the book group queue)

The Tsar of Love and Techno:  Stories by Anthony Marra (author of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena)

Three Moments of Explosion:  Stories by China Miéville (described as a “genre-subverting novelist”)